The Music Notes

Archive for the ‘Dream Pop’ Category

The highly anticipated new album by the canadian duo is awesome. The music is more complex and rich. Nicely layered with guitar, synth/organ and vocals.
The vocals, oh they are so rusty now. Sounds like Victoria Legrand has been smoking a lot since their 2007’s Devotion.

My favorite track is Norway. Where they passionately declare their love for Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine.

Citrus is the second album by the well-known indie-shoegaze outfit Asobi Seksu.
Sharing the mood of other bands lead by a japanese vocalist, Asobi Seksu has delicate and melancholic mood due to Yuke Chikudate. Who sings in english and japanese.

Sweet dream pop melodies and shoegaze tense noise is their trademark, but the exaggerated lo-fi mix darkens their sound.

Asobi Seksu is another band I think could fly so high if they had a classy audio production.
I understand the charm that Kevin Shields created in his noisy l-fi records, but what people forget, is that he worked really hard to achieve that sound. It’s not only lo-fi.

Forgive me, Scarlett Johansson fans, but Anywhere I Lay My Head sounds to me like a rich child whim.
She has everything, what else could she want?
Well, she loves Tom waits and want to record an album with her favourite songs. She likes Cocteau Twins and shoegaze and everything must sound like that.
So that’s it.
I can sound harsh but nothing here sounds authentic or spontaneous. The production is good but it’s clear that Johansson is not a singer.
The best moment, in my humble opinion, is I don’t wanna Grow Up.

Resplandor is a good surprise hailing from Lima, Peru.Pleamar is their third album, it sounds very much like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. So it surely will please dream pop / shoegaze fans.
All songs are enjoyable, the album hasn’t a let down. Therefore, sometimes the vocals get a little too much airy.

I don’t know why they’re so unknown. Probably it’s hard to make things work from Peru. But they’re already could be huge in europe, since there are a lot of shoegaze bands not as good as Rasplandor, with a massive fan-base.

M83 plays an ethereal dream pop. Antony Gonzalez, its mastermind, uses a lot of heavy synthesizers, which sound very much like 90’s new age in my opinion.
Some people call it shoegaze, but there’s only one song that remind me shoegaze, it’s Too Late. This song reminds me of Slowdive.

A BBC Sessions record could have had everything to be the definitve live collection by Cocteau Twins. It embrances the whole Twins carreer, from their early post-punk times to their 1990’s twilight.

The first songs are great. But as the timeline goes further the sound of Cocteau Twins becomes more and more elaborated and sophisticated. In such a manner that there aren’t enough guitars to fill the gaps of their late 80’s and 90’s songs.
Not even the always perfect voice of Liz Fraser could hide the thin sound that was made on those sessions.
It’s a shame, because I watched lots of live footage of Four-Calendar Cafe and Milk and Kisses tours and they were awesome, featuring two guitarists plus Guthrie.